


Half-Life

by draculastan



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Anti-Hero, Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming of Age, Developing Friendships, Double Life, Enemies to Friends, Friends to Enemies, Mentor/Protégé, Sad Danny, Secret Identity, Teen Angst, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-01-15 08:23:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21250352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculastan/pseuds/draculastan
Summary: Danny didn't ask to get electrocuted half to death, or to become some supernatural, possibly immortal, palette-swapped ghost cryptid with exploding fingers. But he's trying his best to make it work.





	1. Chapter 1

Danny sat on the windowsill at the back of the room, kicking his feet impatiently. The outdated, 80s-style air conditioning unit below him rumbled; each knock of his sneaker against the relic making a heavy, metallic shuddering disturb the otherwise silent classroom.

All through the room, students were seated in groups of four, desks pushed up against each other to form tables. It was quiet reading time in Mr. Lancer's ninth-grade English class, which meant two things. No one is to speak to their tablemates, and everyone must have a library book open in front of them. Or, more specifically, everyone is passing written notes to their tablemates, and library books are placed overtop of cell phones, gaming devices, and other contraband beyond the instructor's eyesight. Mr. Lancer was out in the hall for the moment, having placed Dash Baxter in charge of keeping his classmates on task.

Dash looked at Danny with purpose from his own corner of the classroom. Danny sighed. "Fenton, what do you think you're doing?" he crowed. All the heads in the room swiveled to look at Danny, who was leaning against the reinforced glass window with his eyes trained on the wall clock. "Get back to your seat."

"It doesn't matter what I'm doing. It's three. Class is over," Danny responded, doing his best to keep his tone a deadpan. Years of bullying by Dash had taught him, the more emotion you show, the more the jock will have to work with.

"It's 2:55, which means you have five more minutes of reading to do. Unless you want me to tell Lancer about how you were walking around on the desks and air conditioner, and interrupting class."

At this, Danny scowled. He hadn't been walking around on anything. He'd only walked over to the ledge to sit a few minutes ago, because he finished with his book early and had nothing to do. He started to work on a comeback, when Sam piped up, "Wow, Dash. Since when are you such a teacher's pet? Do you get extra credit points for being a snitch?"

The blond noisily stood up from his desk just as Mr. Lancer opened the door to the room. Dash sat back down quickly. The teacher looked around in confusion for a moment, finally setting his eyes on Danny.

"Mr. Fenton! Get off of that air conditioner right this instant."

Danny startled and went intangible, phasing through the window.

* * *

For weeks, people were talking about the incident. The rumors had gotten out of hand. Some claimed Danny had purposefully tried to jump; it was for this reason several of the school counselors pulled him aside or squeezed his shoulder awkwardly when he crossed paths with them in passing periods. Others emphasized his argument with Dash, claiming that Danny had thrown chairs or books and finally smashed through the window. Even his own friends were far too entertained with the situation; Tucker, who was on the opposite block schedule to Danny, would not stop pestering him with questions about the fall. "How did you do it? Did you plan to slip out the window? That was like a four-story drop, dude! I wish I could've seen the look on Dash's face. Or Lancer, oh my God. I bet he was all like, 'Great Gatsby! Somebody, call the fire chief!', or something."

Danny dipped a fry into his ketchup, mentally sifting through possible responses. Next to him, Sam was mixing dressing into her salad and laughing. "It was crazy. Dash started sputtering all this garbage about like, 'It wasn't my fault, I didn't even see him up there!', and then he tried to open the window and grab after him, but he couldn't get the lock to unhinge. And, of course, Danny was nowhere to be seen. Lancer ran down the stairs to 304, 204, and 104, asking them if they'd seen where he landed; I've hardly seen that man take the stairs, and never that fast!"

Tucker shook his head appreciatively. "Dude, you are a legend," he said, slapping a hand on Danny's shoulder. Resting his arm there, he took a bite from his burger.

Despite himself, Danny smiled. "Guilty as charged. You can't write this shit," he joked. "Now, could either of you explain to me how mitosis works? I've gotten pulled out of biology about four times this week, but they've kindly paused the family intervention just in time for this quiz..."

At this, Sam pulled the notebook from her bag and started to skim over the details with him between bites. Danny leaned over the composition book gratefully, gladder to be off the previous topic than onto this new one, but grateful anyway.

He still hadn't explained his ghost form to his friends. Or his family. It had been on his to-do list for... oh, a while, but somehow it always seemed the wrong time. Phantom had become somewhat of a local legend already, and Danny felt shy to take any kind of credit to the fame. It was easier to say he'd gotten caught up with extra chores when he cancelled on friends, and to say he'd been out with friends when he missed dinner with his family. So far, no one was any the wiser, and Danny decided he liked it that way.

He liked to have his secret life. It was fun to fly out at night, with no one to be accountable to. It was only when little blips like this happened with his powers, that he wished he had someone in his corner to cover his ass. He wasn't able to think of an adequate explanation for how he *hadn't* been injured in falling from a window on the top floor. Everything he thought of so far sounded lame, so he had left it a mystery. But that was proving troublesome, because people love to talk about a mystery.

"Did you get all that, Danny?" Sam said after a while, gesturing with her fork.

"Huh? Oh, yeah. That helped a lot, thanks Sam," he said, rubbing his neck.

"If you're sure you got it..." she said, looking at him weirdly. She stabbed a cherry tomato onto her fork, sliding the notebook out of the way to finish her salad. "How did you do that, for real? The window thing. I was watching, and it looked like the window had never even opened. I even asked a couple people, and they said the same thing."

Danny hesitated. "Um... It snapped back closed. It just happened really fast."

Sam squinted at him, pursing her purple-stained lips. There was a long pause at the table; Tucker looked up from his phone and then between the two, curious himself. Finally, the girl said, "Alright then. Keep your secrets," and the friends burst into a chuckling fit.

* * *

Danny looked both ways, then slid out of the men's locker room, closing the heavy wooden door quietly behind him. He'd managed to avoid Dash by hiding in one of the bathroom stalls after gym class, but he wasn't quite in the clear yet. The locker room area, even after hours, was polluted with jocks.

At the sight of a red and white letter jacket turning the corner, Danny ducked behind the nearest trashcan and willed himself to become invisible. His hands disappeared up to his wrists, but the rest of him stayed completely conspicuous. He swore softly, digging his translucent hands into the pockets of his hoodie and crouching down deeper behind the metal trash.

He recognized Kwan's laugh, and heard a second pair of footsteps following behind the teen. Danny relaxed a bit; it wasn't Dash, at least. Sneakers were squeaking on the waxed floor in pace with the clack of heels.

"Don't laugh, I'm serious!" Paulina whined, lightly slapping Kwan on the forearm.

"Sorry, sorry, it's just... kind of silly!" Kwan defended with another light laugh. "I mean, ghosts? In Amity Park? I just don't see it."

He tossed a juice can over his shoulder at the trash can. It hit the rim, bouncing off the can and hitting Danny on the head. He didn't move from his hiding spot but blinked in annoyance.

"Aw, damn..." Kwan mumbled, stopping with the intent to correct his littering.

Paulina snapped her fingers at him in annoyance. "Are you even listening to me? I've been trying to tell you, I really saw him this time! It was the ghost boy, standing out by the lake. You know, where we have our bonfires? He was floating over the water! Like Jesus or something!"

Kwan forgot his can, scratching his scalp contemplatively. "Are you sure it wasn't just a trick of the light? It was a full moon last night, after all. It could have just been a really bright reflection."

Danny peered around the trashcan, observing the conversation with interest. Paulina always did make such a fuss over him, when he was a ghost anyway. But last night had been a hassle.

"It wasn't just light. He was glowing, sure, but he was real. Had a body and everything. The second I saw him, I ran out onto the dock. He's just as handsome as the rumors say," she gushed.

Danny blushed proudly.

Kwan rolled his eyes. "Paulina..."

"I can prove it to you. I tried to talk to him, and he actually looked at me. Well, he ran away after that, but, look; I have the video on my phone."

Paulina produced a blurry sixteen-second clip. The greater half of it featured a nice look at the rotting wood planks of the dock and her pink slip-on flats, but for just a moment she captured on video the surface of the lake. Although the lens was not well-focused, in the middle of the dark lake there is a bright white blob. Her companion watched with rising interest. In the audio of the video, Paulina called out "Hey, Inviso-Bill!"

Danny cringed from his position on the floor.

The white form in the video twists to look at her, and from across the lake two green dots are briefly visible before the blob disappears entirely. The clip then abruptly ends.

"Whoooaaaa!" Kwan exclaimed. "Okay, that is pretty crazy, I'm not gonna lie. I was gonna say, I thought it was just a goose or something... But, did you see those green dots? They looked like eyes!"

"I know!" Paulina squeaked. "I swear, that was him! He had bright green eyes, and his hair was silver-white, like it was made of the moonlight," she swooned.

Kwan laughed again, tossing his arm around her shoulder. "Oh God, you're such a fangirl. Come on, let's head out to the field."

When the two finally continued down the hall, Danny sighed in relief. His face was still burning from Paulina's description of him. "Like the moonlight..." he muttered to himself, adjusting his backpack strap. Even he thought that wording was a bit embarrassing, all things considered, but for Paulina to be such a dork over him was something different. It confused him and flattered him, as much as it inconvenienced him at times.

He had, in fact, been at the lake last night. He was practicing with his flight abilities. It was a lot of fun to be weightless like that, even if he could only keep it up for a bit at a time. He'd purposefully gone to the woods to stay out of sight; with all of the excitement he'd had in his school life from the window incident, the last thing he needed was a parallel scandal as Phantom. He'd learned lessons enough about flying around in plain sight when some game hunters shot at him in the early morning the weekend before. On the local radio the men had raved like idiots, talking about "the biggest goddamn turkey I've ever seen, I'll tell you what."

It was frustrating, if he was honest with himself. It seemed like, no matter how much effort he put into controlling his powers, he continuously found himself at their fickle mercy. He couldn't fly in the middle of the day until he could master transparency, and who knows when that would be? Becoming invisible was even more complicated than hovering, but he would practically have to master the two at once to get anything realistically accomplished.

Thinking of this, Danny peeked into his jacket pocket hesitantly. He sighed again. At least his hands had reappeared.

He pushed through the steel double doors and breathed in the crisp autumn air. "Thank God it's Friday," he thought to himself. "I can't stand another minute of this place."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it this far, thank you for reading! :) Hell, even if you didn't make it this far, thanks for clicking. This story is going to be rather long so I'm setting it up slowly; pardon that. Hopefully it's an interesting enough pilot chapter~
> 
> Next chapter we'll learn a bit about Danny's family, and he'll have an encounter with another ghost. I'm considering going a bit AU with some aspects of the Fenton household, so don't let it throw you off when we get there! 
> 
> Thank you for your time <3 Leave me a comment or say hi to me over tumblr if you prefer.


	2. Lady of the Lake

Danny lay in bed, staring up at his ceiling fan. It squeaked with each rotation, shaking fit to come loose from its bolts. It was the same fan from when the house was built, some fifty years ago; in both style and wear, it showed its age. The fan had been loose and noisy like this longer than Danny had been alive, but every time it ran, he felt the same anxiety. "Today's the day it falls," he thought to himself. "It's going to snap and fall and crush me to death."

He stared up complacently, transfixed with the motion. He'd been watching it, frozen in place, right up until his cell phone started ringing.

_"Tsunaida tamashii no hi ga / mune wo sasu nara, / Kotoba yori motto tsuyoi hibiki ga / ima kikoeru ka? ..."_

He rolled over to his nightstand to silence it, holding his thumb on the "volume down" button until it was inaudible. The caller ID read "Sam". He watched it ring in a silent panic, altogether lacking the energy to speak to her. They hadn't made plans for today, right...? He looked to his wall calendar for help, but it was still flipped to last month.

His phone rang its course without being picked up, and he felt a little relief to see it click back to his lock screen. He'd think of something to say to Sam later... He slept in by mistake, or he left his phone in his backpack.

Now fully awake from adrenaline, Danny stood up and started to dress. His bedhead was frankly awful, but he didn't have the energy to take a shower. He fussed with brushing it for a brief and futile moment, but quickly resigned to pulling on a grey beanie. He scratched the dust from the corners of his eyes and tugged at his binder from underneath his t-shirt, finally settling his appearance into an acceptable degree of unacceptable. All other things accounted for, the bags under his eyes were so bad, it looked like he'd smeared eye-shadow onto himself.

"God..." he mumbled, turning away from the mirror entirely.

It was only nine A.M., just a bit after sunrise for the time of year. Danny wasn't normally awake this early on a weekend, but he'd had some trouble sleeping the past few days. Even if Sam hadn't called, he was laying up since at least six anyway. He couldn't relax, being the center of so much gossip. All week long, he'd felt eyes on his back at all times. All the nice e-mails his teachers had sent him since the slip-up were making his stomach knot up with guilt.

It was only a matter of time before his mom caught wind of it all. Danny had managed to keep it quiet, at least while she was out of the country presenting her research, but all it would take is one concerned voice mail to send him to hell. It was a miracle Jazz had started university early and left Casper High the year before; if she was still in school with him, he'd lose the last shred of privacy to his name.

Danny closed his bedroom door behind him and quietly padded down the stairs. The thought passed through his mind that he might need to clean up the house before his mom got back, but he pushed it away. "I'll get to that later," he said to himself under his breath. "The dishes won't get any dirtier."

His father's boots sat beside the front door, gathering dust. Danny paused beside them, an unnameable emotion passing through his chest. He stared at them until his eyes were dry, then phased through the front door and took off.

* * *

The woods were empty this weekend. Most of the popular crowd were on a bus heading out of the city, tonight being the state soccer finals. Casper High hadn't qualified for finals in five years, so it was quite the event, or so Danny had heard. He really never cared for sports; too loud, too physical, too gendered. As a kid he'd always hated getting separated into boys and girls’ teams; he'd sit out in the grass and outright refuse to play.

He smiled to himself at the memory, walking through a field of grass between two thickets of trees at that very moment. "Got a lot of dandelion picking done. Can't kick a goal, but I make a damn fine flower crown." Around him there were all variety of wildflowers, in blue, yellow, lavender, and shocks of pink. It was simply gorgeous out.

The silence eased his anxiety significantly. He felt a wave of merriness fall over him and had the impulse to lay in the grass right where he was to nap and cloud-gaze. But he did have a destination in mind that pulled him onward.

Through the trees, a soft singing voice lilted a foreign melody. Danny had heard it a few times while he trained here, but never so clearly as today. He pressed on towards the singer, compelled to confront her while the general public was out. Yet the longer he walked on, his resolve melted into longing. He knew she must be a ghost or a temptress, but the primitive part of his mind questioned how anything so soothing could be dangerous. His feet carried him briskly towards her, though his mind grew foggy.

At last he was at the lake. He was distantly aware that he was no longer in control of his own body, but he didn't feel afraid. He dropped to his hands and knees at the shore of the water, peering down into its depths.

The siren-like woman sang on from below the surface.

Danny was absolutely entranced. He felt his chest rippling up with a passion emulating love. He had never felt this way before, he was certain. He could not explain it, but he knew that the woman at the bottom of the lake must be extremely beautiful to possess such a voice. He felt it was fate that brought him here.

"I can't stay away from you anymore; this is driving me crazy."

He recognized his own voice pass through his lips, but he wasn't sure what it meant. His center of gravity swayed; his head grew heavy and bobbed down towards the water, nearly throwing him off balance.

He couldn't move or pull himself away from the water, although he realized he was in danger. Even the stinging cold of ghostly mist alerting him to a third ghostly presence was not enough to mobilize him. Danny sagged forward, sinking fast into the lake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, thanks for coming back! Or, thanks for clicking this fic for the first time! Either one is nice of you. I didn't mean to hold people in suspense or anything with that huge update gap, I just was letting the ideas stew in my mind for a bit. I'm not very experienced with fan-fiction, but I enjoy this fandom so I do really want to give it a go. 
> 
> For any weebs reading this fic, the random romaji towards the beginning is the lyrics to the opening for Soul Eater, "Resonance" by T.M. Revolution. It's a song that gets me hyped up, and I am writing Danny as a little edgy, so I think he would have an edgy weeb ringtone.
> 
> Let me know what you thought of this chapter over tumblr or as a comment! Or if you have questions, I'll answer those too. This chapter has a teeny tiny cliff-hanger, I hope that doesn't annoy people. lol


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